Synopsis:
At 2:15am somebody said, "hey let's do a game."
Ten minutes later we gathered in front of the whiteboard, set an egg timer for 35
minutes (our self-imposed design deadline), and went at it. Half an hour later
we emerged with a game idea about sneaking around through mazes with guards who
walk regular or random patrols. Maps were simply 24-bit TGAs with special RGB
colors representing key information:
white for walls (impassible, block line-of-sight);
grey for windows (impassible, don't block LOS);
red for enemy spawnpoints,
blue for enemy patrol paths,
green for player spawnpoint,
yellow for player goal, etc.
Guard vision is represented by cones (overhead view) which are occluded
pixel-perfect by white (wall) elements in the map. Thus, the player
can hide in shadows cast by the guards' flashlights as they pass over
a pillar in front of them. The world is also real-time deformable
with pixel accuracy. Entering a guard's cone of vision for more than
a split second causes your "bustactulation" meter to peak out and you
get caught. Features the game-tweak constant DISBUSTACULATION_PER_SECOND.

Unfinished business:
Win/lose conditions mainly. We also failed to fully leverage the fact that
we had a pretty cool fully dynamic world with real-time pixel-accurate
lighting... would've been nice to be able to plant bombs, destroy
walls, open and close doors, etc. Programmer art only.

Postmortem notes

What went right

Using TGAs as map data worked fantastically well.

Picked a simple idea, a simple implementation path, and executed it.

Kept the design concept simple and concrete.

Enemy pathfollowing, though hacky, worked well.

Had dynamic real-time pixel-accurate raycasting.

What went wrong

Totally failed to capitalize on the fact that maps were fully dynamic and could be altered in real time (e.g. doors opening / closing, mobile LOS blockers / shadow casters, bombs and destructible walls, etc.)

Didn't have any design endgame in sight; ultimately, we didn't know where we were taking this.

We started off approaching several tasks from a hack-it-now standpoint rather than taking the extra minute or two to consider all the options.

Didn't have any support for graphics or cosmetics (e.g. loading a separate TGA for the map graphic itself).

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"Squirrel" Eiserloh. Note that neither Brian Eiserloh nor the ALGDS
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